Riot Games creates a 'League of Legends' anti-bully task force

League of Legends developer Riot Games have created what they are calling the Player Behavior and Justice Team to combat players being "jerks".

In a recent interview with Gamasutra, the game's lead producer Travis George stated that the team was created to monitor foul players in an effort to better understand it and create new ways of stopping bullies.

“Nobody wants to play a game with somebody who’s mean. There’s a line, and that line generally is people being mean for the sake of being mean – telling you what to do, telling you how bad you are. And I think we can actually fix a lot of that.

“We actually have built a team around this. We call it, lovingly, the Player Behaviour and Justice Team. There are a lot of really talented folks on that team, including two PhDs. One’s a cognitive neuroscientist and one’s a behavioural psychologist.

“We’ve actually developed specific trends, and our own set of metrics that we look at for measuring what percentage of times we think that players will encounter a negative experience in a game, and how severe that negative experience is,” says George. “And then we have to build things or be responsive or message the community in a particular way to address those things.”

Policing games to this degree has always been a double-edged sword as player often see a strict environment for playing as a negative. So the question to ask is how can Riot Games properly enforce the rules to a fair and equitable standpoint?

“We don’t like players being jerks in games. We’ve experienced it all ourselves,” he explained. “But we actually sat down and said, ‘How do we actually more tangibly understand how bad the impact is, or what the impact is, or understand the problem more?’

“And that’s where you’ve got guys who are PhD researchers who can help develop those models, and we have, actually, those models for how we track and trend what we call ‘player behavior,’

“You can apply really good research and science techniques to almost anything. The trick is just finding what you want to actually spend the time on, and that’s where the sentiment for players comes in as a huge guiding factor to that.”